In what any sensible human being can only consider a triumph for both the A's and Fremont, the A's-to-Fremont plan is dead.

Not just dead, but dead-dead-dead. Lew Wolff's master plan to put the A's in the worst imaginable place for both the team and the town officially croaked when the ballpark project agenda item for Tuesday's Fremont City Council meeting was canceled, and the A's asked that the environmental impact report and notice of preparation processes be stopped.

That's city clerk-ese for Grandpa Lew has given up the ghost on a project that would have hosed the A's financially, annoyed Fremont residents and made the Giants extraordinarily happy: three things that any right-thinking A's fan would wish to avoid.

That it took Wolff this long is a testament mostly to his stubbornness, as many people already saw the ballpark village nobody could get to as a moonstruck plan even before the economy made it a total nonstarter. It was a real estate deal with the baseball team as a hook, and made less sense than any other plan, including moving the team back to Philadelphia and exhuming Connie Mack.

It may also serve as a sobering note for the 49ers and their quixotic attempt to make a football stadium spring forth from a merry-go-round. These are cruddy times to borrow money for anything, let alone hundreds of millions for something that rarely rises even to the minimal level of paying for itself. Now Jed York and Gavin Newsom can figure out a way to kiss, make up and slap some rouge and eyeliner on Candlestick Park. And good luck with that, you crazy kids.

It certainly eliminates Al Davis' nascent plan to build a new Coliseum on the spot where the old one currently stands. It is, after all, hard to get permits to build on a site that is still in daily use by a baseball team, and while Al would not necessarily find that a stumbling block, the A's would probably object to having their employees duck wrecking balls while trying to chase down a double in the left-center field gap.

Now we could spend more time kicking Lew and the man he fronts, John (Baby Gap) Fisher, for expending so much energy and money on such a dubious enterprise, but another and more problematic issue comes to mind, namely, whether Fisher and Wolff will still be interested in holding the team without the promise of a new ballpark anywhere.

Oh sure there's San Jose, and that is only a few hundred million dollars, some currently absent political will, thousands of angry taxpayers and a few environmental impact reports away from becoming reality. You'll notice we didn't include the Giants' territorial rights claims. Because those are about as enforceable as Germany's claims on Tanzania, we decided to ignore them as baseball will if and when the time comes.

More realistically, though, the A's are back in Oakland and for many years to come, as predicted by smart people everywhere. And if that is the case, the first thing for Fisher and Wolff to come out and say without A-Rod-ian equivocation is whether they intend to hold or sell.

This is important because if they were only in baseball for the stadium possibilities, they will have to hustle up a buyer in a difficult market. And if they were in it for the baseball, a quick announcement wouldn't be the worst thing in the world for a fan base that has lost some of its affection for the town team. All things considered, a team whose owner wants the team is always better than one whose owner doesn't.

Fisher's essential interest in the A's has never been fully divulged, though one can reasonably expect that his father's unpleasant experience owning a piece of the Giants might have weighed on his decision. Wolff's interest has always been presumed to be predicated upon a grand land development scheme with the team as the hook for everything around it. You know, the Ballpark Village plan.

But when the A's said Tuesday they wouldn't send anyone to the city council meeting this coming Tuesday, something was up. When they didn't send their check for the notice of preparation filing, thus essentially killing the environmental report, something was really up.

And Friday, the logic of having nowhere left to take a project too few people really wanted finally forced itself on Fisher and Wolff. It was a bad idea when they thought of it, a bad idea while they pursued it and now it is a bad idea saved from fruition by circumstances. Sometimes you get the right result even while doing all the wrong things.

The answer to the next question, though, will determine whether they're ready to live with the right result. In or out, boys - time to declare.